CHAPTER XVII
THOMAS TRAHERNE AND THE SPIRITUAL POETS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
I
The powerful religious upheaval in England which reached its culmination during the two middle decades of the seventeenth century, profoundly stirred both the upper and lower intellectual strata of society. It fused and organized men on the one hand, and carried them beyond themselves; and on the other hand it broke up settled habits of thought, swept away many customs and practices which had become almost irresistible subconscious influences, and left those who were in any way morally and intellectually defective at the mercy of chance currents and eddies. As a result there appeared a strange medley of tiny sects. These groups, seething with enthusiasm, scattered pretty much over England, unorganized or loosely organized, generally gathered about some influential psychopathic leader, were lumped together in the public mind and named "Ranters."[1] They are by no means a negligible phenomenon of the period. They reveal the back-wash of the spiritual movement, which in the main went steadily onward. They exhibit, in their loose and unmoralized freedom, the inherent dangers which attach to the proclamation of spiritual liberty, and they furnish a clear historical illustration of the truth that progress toward a religion grounded upon the inner life of man can only be slowly and painfully achieved.
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The religious poets of this period, on the other hand, furnish clear evidence of the constructive, organizing and fusing power of these newly dawning spiritual insights, as they worked upon the minds of highly gifted and endowed persons. Poets are not Reformers. They do not consider themselves "commissioned" to reconstruct old systems of thought, old forms of faith and old types of church-organization, or to re-interpret the Gospel, the way of salvation and the communion of saints. Their mission is a different one, though it is no less spiritual and, in the best sense of the word, no less practical. The poets are always among the first to feel the direction of spiritual currents, and they are very sure voices of the deeper hopes and aspirations of their epoch. All the religious poets of this particular period reveal very clearly the influence of the ideas which were central in the teaching of the spiritual leaders whom we have been studying. The reader of Milton needs no argument to convince him of the fact that, however far removed the great poet was in most points of view from the contemporary Quakers, he nevertheless insisted emphatically, as they did, on the illumination of the soul by a Light within; "a celestial Light," he calls it in Paradise Lost, which shines inward and irradiates the mind through all her powers, and supplies an inward sight of things invisible to sense[2]—a Light which steadily increases as it is used by the obedient soul.[3] The origin of this inward Light, according to Milton's thought, is the eternal Word of God, who is before all worlds and who is the source of all revelation, whether inward or outward: the Spirit that prefers
Before all temples the upright heart and pure.[4]
The minor religious poets of the period had not, however, formed their intellectual outlook under the imperial sway of theological systems of thought in anything like {322} the degree that Milton had. They reflect the freer and less rigidly formulated currents of thought. "All divinity is love, or wonder," John Donne wrote in one of his poems. No phrase could better express the intense religious life of the group of spiritual poets in England who interpreted in beautiful, often immortal, form this religion of the spirit, this glowing consciousness that the world and all its fulness is God's and that eternity is set within the soul of man, who never is himself until he finds his Life in God.
E'en like two little bank-dividing brooks,
That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,
And having rang'd and search'd a thousand nooks,
Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,
Where in a greater current they conjoin:
So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.
E'en so we met: and after long pursuit,
E'en so we joined; we both became entire:
No need for either to renew a suit,
For I was flax and He was flames of fire.
Our firm united souls did more than twine;
So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.[5]